Like Hyderabad, & Bengaluru, facial recognition will also come to Pune Airport

Pune’s Lohegaon airport shall soon have facial recognition systems for entry, boarding, and security checks according to reports from the city. With this, Pune airport shall become one of the 7 airports in the country currently having or selected to run the facial recognition technology. Delhi, Bengaluru and Hyderabad already have the project running partially or fully on a trial basis as a part of the government’s Digi Yatra programme.

Kolkata, Varanasi, and Vijayawada are also on the list to have the technology installed.

Costing a total of Rs 14 Crore, the entire project is expected to be implemented by next year according to Pune Airport’s director Ajay Kumar, which has been assigned to Japanese firm M/s NEC Technologies. NEC is also the firm responsible for implementing facial recognition at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics with another firm. However, this project has been assigned to its New Delhi based Indian subsidiary.

NEC Technologies shall also maintain the system at the airport for at least the next seven years, after the implementation.

Indian government has pushed for the technology citing ease of travel, lesser hassle and saving of paperwork. Under this feature, passengers will not have to stand in queues or deal with a lot of paperwork. Cameras at different check points shall automatically recognise and open gates for them after their identity proof has initially been checked and authenticated by a CISF personnel. This however shall only happen the first time they fly after their Digi Yatra ID registration and/or if they do not use an Aadhaar ID as proof while registering.

While this is in the initial stages in India, multiple airports abroad have already implemented and are running such systems on their premises.